You can make your own high-protein feed supplements and produce crop oils that sell for a premium with this new small scale oilseed crusher designed and built by a North Dakotan.

"I was looking for an oil expeller for my own use. The only small scale units I found were foreign and too expensive with shipping. I decided to design my own. Interest has been so strong, we're now manufacturing it," says Eugene Clooten about the Dakota Oil Mill, which squeezes oil out of soybeans, sunflower seeds, canola, cottonseed and any other oil seed. Depending on the seed, it works at a rate of 70 to 100 lbs. per hour. Clooten is working on a larger model that'll crush up to 300 lbs. of seed per hour.

"It operates totally unattended. You can fill a hopper and let it work all day while you're doing other chores," says Clooten.

Clooten has had interest from livestock producers, who want to make their own protein meal supplements, people interested in selling crop oils (flax oil, for instance, sells for quite a bit per lb.), and from health food companies who sell raw crop oils to be taken as a human nutritional supplement.

The oil crasher is 32 by 36 in. and weighs 250 lbs. It's powered by a 3 hp, 3-phase motor. Seed flows out of the hopper into a screw worm that conveys material through specially designed cages where it's crushed and squeezed. The screw worm shaft is plated with case-hardened manganese nickle which meets FDA food grade regulations.

"One advantage of this machine is that oil comes out at only 78 to 80 degrees so no nutrients are destroyed due to high temperatures, as with big commerical expellers. Also, the meal coming out is much higher in fat content than the commercial supplements most livestock producers buy. Soybean meal, cottonseed meal and sunflower meal all have from 10 to 12 percent oil content versus the 1 percent oil content of many commerical supplements, which are chemically purged to get all the oil out. Cattle and hogs like the taste better and they gain faster on it," says Clooten.